Martijn's Weblog

Theories of time

Slashdot posted an article about a new theory solving the grandfather
paradox.

http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/06/17/1728230.shtml

My personal favourite theory is the one used by Isaac Asimov in his
book The End of Eternity. It's a bit like the B-theory where you can
only go back in time to fulfil what has already happened, but with an
interesting twist.

Basically, time flows forward but follows the "mostly likely options".
If you make a change at point X the changes propegate forward but at
some point in the future the timeline converges back to what it was
before. The book itself doesn't really go into details, it's not
important to the story, but it's plausable that the energy required to
do timetravel would be distributed to all the "random" changes needed
to get the timeline back on track.

Now, the grandfather paradox would be resolved in the simplest and
cheapest way energywise by simply twiddling some electrons in your
brain so that you didn't decide to to it at all. But say you were
insulated from the timeline changes yourself (as in the book) then
what?

The book itself makes the point of only removing people fro mthe
timeline that wern't going to have children or about to die anyway
since that solves the major problem. It's not entierly implausible that
it would be cheaper energywise to simply have a quantum force push the
bullet out of the way.

If you did actually manage to kill your parents and avoid them coming
back to life, well, you have a problem. Maybe the easiest solution
would be to have the entire human race die out. Solves the paradox
problem once and for all.

Now that would suck :)
--

A little while later...

Well, it's now been a while since the No vote from Holland and where
are we now. Well, exactly where we could have expected, exactly where
we were before. After all, that's what people voted for.

However, I'm still disappointed and still think that a lot of people
voted based on misinformation and misconceptions about the
"Constitution". At least the yes campain admitted several mistakes,
like calling the damn thing a constitution in the first place. It's a
treaty, a nice one for sure but just another treaty.

And it's been pointed out before, it's a bit silly to hold a referendum
on a text of which some 95% is currently active law. The rest was
just tinkering on the sides to streamline the process. Ironically
people who voted against it because of the so called "bureaucracy" in
Brussels have themselves contributed by not allowing them to clean it
up.

I actually found a nice article by Terry Wynn
on the EU Budget which neatly
debunks several myths about where the money is actually going and where
the "scandels" about fraud come from. Basically, the statistical method
used by the auditors practically guarentees a large over estimate in
actual fraud. Plus most of the "errors" are committed by the Member
States, not the EU.

In any case, it's nice to know where people were getting these figures
about the Netherlands paying 15 times as much as Denmark. After all if
country A pays one euro and country B pays 50 euros, sure, country B
has paid 50 times as much but it's kind of missing the point. Ratios
are useless without a baseline. Not to mention that the "allocations to
countries" is not exact. Some organisations specifically open accounts
in Belgium to receive grant money, making Belgium overrepresented. The
leaders in Belgium are going to present a chart that shows that Belgium
pays the most per head compared to any country in the EU.

Lies, damn lies and statistics. The money came from the EU and went to
the EU. Arguing over which countries it came from or too is not in the
spirit of the EU.

Anyway, the whole thing is getting out of hand. The Belguim's foreign
minister has compared our Minister-President to Harry Potter, which is
funny because they do actually look similar.

And the concessions? Well, they're not going to mention the T-word
(Turkey) in the next EU summit, though the plans are still going right
ahead. The EU discount is conditional on the UK giving up it's 4.4
billion euro bonus, which they're hardly going to give up lightly (who
would). And the value of the Euro just keeps going down. I'll keep my
money in Australia for the time being...
--

The European Constitution

Well well well, it looks like the new "EU constitution" has hit a bump
it's not going to be able to recover from. I must say, personally I
think this is a really big shame. Here was a chance to clarify what the
EU stood for, remove a whole pile of bureaucracy and get everything
working smoothly.

Well, that's not going to happen. The stupid thing is that the French
vote wasn't even on the issues of the constitution itself but on
whether people liked the government and their opinion on the expansion.
Here in Holland the issues are different but the effect may well be the
same. Here people complain about:

* The old Guilder exchange rate to the Euro was too low, as seemed
to be indicated by a badly worded report from the central bank. It
actually said relative to the Deutch Mark, but was a good average
overall but people will grab anything to complain about.
* That people don't like the government. The current government has
like a 26% approval rating.
* Fear about Turkey and immigration, things which the constitution
actually improved but nothing like FUD to throw a spammer in the works.

The government is for, almost all the opposition is for, but that is
used as an argument for voting against. The government spent 34 million
euro on the 'yes' campain but none on the 'no', so obviously they have
something to hide, right.

As was pointed out this morning, the difference in views between what
the French population apparently want and what the EU is supposed to
stand for are so diametrically opposed that renegotitation or tweaking
of the treaty is not a plausable solution. Huge amounts of time,
effort, money and negotiation went into this version and that didn't
work, so I think that there's no chance next time will come up with
anything better.

Actually, reminds me of the constitutional convention in Australia with
respect to becoming a republic. what was a concensus between people
elected to make the decision, didn't match what people expected. The EU
constitution was agreed unanimously between all 25 governments in the
EU, but the populations disagree with their respective governments.

Just a quick comment about one argument, that we and every other
country would lose veto power over most issues. There seems to be a
concern that unless you have a veto power you're screwed. I have to say
that giving everyone a veto power over everything screws you just as
much. Say you want to enforce labelling of GM food, but some small
country decides that they think it's a waste of ink and vetos it. The
effect of removing vetos is that people consider compromise and work
for a better outcome.

A number of EU ministers have said that if the constitution doesn't
make it, they'll try to introduce as many of the changes as they can
that don't require a treaty to agree. My fear is that instead of the
clear concise methods in the constitution we'll get some warped version
which is a compromise of the current sitting people rather than the
commenly agreed compromise in the constitution.

Ofcourse, they were stupid to call it a "constitution" anyway. That
word brings up all sorts of associations which, depending on who you
are, could be either positive or negative. In my opinion these changes
were too important to be put in a document with such a loaded title. It
should have been called "Treaty of " which would have
made it a much easier sell, except ofcourse, people wanted the loaded
meaning, to create a unified voice.

Anyway, this has become much too long a rant. We're voting here on
Wednesday and it doesn't look good. Looks like we'll be stuck with
secret meetings of the European Council for some time yet.

Have a nice day,
--

About borrowing money

John, an American negotiator is on his way to the regularly scheduled
meeting with the usual trade partners, China, Japan, several EU
countries. He enters the room where the other are waiting, talking
about the latest stock market fluctuations.

He sits down.

"Look guys, we're going to need to borrow another 100 billion dollars.
This war in Iraq is turning out to be a lot more expensive than we
expected".

A silence falls. Everybody looks serious.

The chinese delegate says "You know, you owe us a lot of money already,
we were wondering if it was getting a bit much and maybe we should stop
until you start paying it off properly".

John's heart stops. Visions flash through his mind, millions of
government workers not getting paid. Projects axed. Unpaid workers are
unhappy workers, and they can't buy anything either. What about
mortgages that need to be paid? These are not good things.

Sweat beads on his forehead.

"Just kidding!" says the Chinese delegate, everybody laughs. "We're not
that kind of people, we like you very much." He pulls out the
chequebook. "So, 20% interest sounds good to me..."
--

Evolution

http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/05/15/1216216.shtml?tid=191&tid=126&tid=14

Ah, gotta love Slashdot. Where else would you get articles about the
end of evolution? Complete with comments that in 100 years the average
IQ will be 60-70. They'd better look up the definition of IQ.

As usual though, there are a few pearls of wisdom. Like the fact that
some people have slightly odd physiologies so that they don't respond
well to medicines, are going to be on the losing side. Reminds me of an
article here about how in France people are always gettings heaps of
drugs from pharmacies because they're choosing doctors who'll perscribe
stuff over doctors who don't.

But they're right though, evolution never stops, it's just takes a
different form. Now almost everybody with any kind of defect lives to
repoduce giving the gene a massive amount of variation. All we need is
a pandemic to come around and kill off the really weak ones. Any
mutation that requires the person to be continually supported will be
wiped out real quick when the government ceases to exist or a meteor
hits earth. But in the meantime, any other benficial mutations they had
will be passed on as well...

I actually the problem is more that with people travelling all over the
place, beneficial mutations will get diluted so much that they'll never
get together to form a meaningful subgroup that is differentiated.

Anyway, it's not like there's anything we can do about it. We'll be
dead before we notice anyway...

I do like one suggestion for an indicator of the ultimate evolved
human: when they have a pulsating white apple symbol under their skin
when they sleep...
--

HHGTTG, the TV series and Doctor Who

It's been suggested to me that I could hop on a flight to the UK and
watch HHGTTG there. I'm desperate, but not that desperate.

As consolation though I'm watching the TV series again which is quite
funny still and longer to boot :)

Also, I just noticed that I'm getting the new Doctor Who series. I
mean, I'm getting BBC1 and BBC2, it just never occurred to me to check.
Anyway, they're up to 1.8 "Fathers Day" so I missed the first 7
episodes. Teach me for removing the wishlist from my TiVo. Blah.

Oh yeah, why do they keep repeating Voyager endlessly but not TNG?
--

HHGTTG...

So I look up on the web when Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy will
screen here and the answer is... 4th of August. Bummer...
--

Some things don't change...

Like people in Canberra turning their gardens into swamps. Water
restrictions, ha!

Like stuff in Sydney never really drying. Too much humidity.
--

You wouldn't want this to happen to you...

From a Slashdot article I got directed to this page: Admin Horror Stories.
Absolutly good for a laugh :)

One of my favourites is:

Years ago when I was working in the Graphics Workshop at Edinburgh
University, we used to have a small UNIX machine for testing. The
machine wasn't used too much, so nobody bothered to set up user
accounts, and so everybody was running as root all the time. Now one of
the chaps who used to come in was fond of reading fortunes
(/usr/games/fortune having been removed from the University's real
machines along with all the other games). Guess what happened when the
machine said

# fortune

fortune: write error on /dev/null --- please empty the bit bucket

Quite a lot of stuff wouldn't work after the chap was done with the
machine for the day. You bet we put up proper accounts after that!

As it happens I did something silly once, back in the period I was
helping Chris with some computer service stuff. We where just looking
install some new software on a guys Windows machine (in a business). He
had partitions all over the place but was only using one of them. So we
decided to consolidate the unused partitions to make space.

Fired up fdisk to delete the extra partitions. We carefully wrote down
all the sizes and stuff and proceeded to delete them. If you've used
DOS FDISK you'll know it's a pain in the butt. Can't remember exactly
how but we ended up deleting the wrong partition. Oops!

Fortunatly we had the details so we added it back exactly the same
size. You'd think this would be fine. However, one detail about dos fdisk
is that it wipes the first sector of a partition, otherwise dos gets
confused about the size. Without this sector dos assumes the filesystem
is empty.

At this point we were beginning to sweat. We had a Linuxcare bootable
cd which we had used to view the system in various way (sector counts
and stuff) but nothing that just fixes the filesystem header but leaves
the FAT tables and root partition alone. In the end we formatted
another partition and used dd to copy the first sector over. At this
point we could access the data and make a backup. We'd been this
close to losing all the guys data.

Sure learn't a lesson from that one...
--

Daylight Savings

Amazing! Apparently the whole thing behind daylight savings is that it
actually saves the country 60 million Euros per year just on saved
energy. Not a bad deal. The extra daylight is pretty cool too...
--